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It starts with an armoured pterichthyodes, swimming through shallow waters 400 million years ago, scavenging for organic detritus, sweeping up decay.
Some time later, an amateur geologist cracks open a block of sandstone and discovers the clear outline of a fish, which is later confirmed as a Devonian fossil.
Then, a group of scientists and artists visit the Scottish town of Cromarty in search of stories. A museum has been created about the geologist, who became famous for his discoveries.
Before that, a group of fishermen spend several months in a rudimentary bothy, net fishing for salmon, which are sent to Spain and Italy.
Elsewhere, Afro-Caribbean slaves work cotton plantations in America, their lives and labour sustained by salted fish caught thousands of miles away.
Earlier, igneous rocks move in and displace sandstone, and glaciers carve out the landscape making mountains and valleys.
Later on, an Englishman sits in the converted attic space of an old brewery in Cromarty, writing words on his Apple computer.
At the same time, shoals of shimmering salmon head on towards the continental shelf where they will grow fat and find their way further north.
In the future, a whisky bottle, discarded by a pair of kayakers staying in a disused fishing station, becomes the start of an impromptu coral reef that continues to grow over the decades that follow, covering fifty square kilometres off the coast of the Black Isle.
Then, an Atlantic salmon returns to the River Feshie in the Cairngorms and thrashing her tail she makes a gravel basket for her eggs.
Previously, a man takes a train to the English city of Newcastle where he will spend a few days, before returning to his home in Washington state, with the North Pacific stretching out to the west.
Millions of years later, the individual components of a laptop break down and decompose. Other parts are resistant to these processes and form future fossils from the Anthropocene.
Then, a winter storm brings nutrients up from the deep ocean to the surface waters, where blooms of phytoplankton flow up the aquatic food chain, supporting zooplankton that are snapped up by migrating salmon.
Then someone blows up a waterfall to open up new migration routes.
Then 400,000 salmon eggs are gathered in a hatchery and re-placed upstream.
Then, two water bailiffs sit in a van for 10 hours, until they watch poachers removing salmon from their nets and move in for the arrest.
Then a visual artist, a musicologist, and several children arrive.
Then a pint of India Pale Ale is pulled.
Then, sand grains form, as minerals of quartz and feldspar are worn off other rocks and ground down. These are compacted and cemented together over tens of thousands of years and at some point, a fish dies, and sediment covers its body for tens of thousands more.
It ends as inconspicuously as it starts, as a salmonoid swims through deep waters 400,000 years from now, ingesting sand eel larvae, riding the current, seeking out the future.
Elizabeth Vander Meer (left) and the Sustainability in Education Research Group at Pollock Halls student residence, University of Edinburgh
Hedgehogs are nocturnal so there was little possibility of seeing one when
my new colleague, Elizabeth Vander Meer, led a small group from the University of Edinburgh’s Sustainability in Education Research Group to the student accommodation at Pollock Halls, where there is a healthy population. In fact, a sighting would have been concerning, perhaps indicating injury or dehydration, so none of us would have liked to encounter one that day. An unusual adventure then: to move close but never reach each other; to search but never find. This is how hedgehogs co-exist with us in the urban environment. Their time is when most of us are sleeping; their place is in the gaps and disregarded spaces of our busy city lives. Every now and then, paths cross and these prickly night wanderers reveal something of their hidden worlds.
As part of the Hedgehog Friendly Campus initiative, Elizabeth and her colleagues have been mapping, recording and documenting the journeys and behaviours of the University’s hedgehog community (Cousquer et al. 2024). Their work has led to rewilded corners of the campus, new shelters made of logs and targeted planting, training programmes, surveys, community engagement, signage, and student research projects. In 2022, the University was awarded Gold status for ‘embedding and sustainability of continued actions as well as wider engagement with local and regionally based communities’ (p. 111). And why all this hard work? Well, habitats are reducing, fatalities due to traffic are on the rise, water can be hard to find, the climate is becoming less predictable, and populations are significantly declining. Hedgehogs are now classed as vulnerable to extinction in the United Kingdom. If we can prevent this from happening, then maybe there is hope for us too?
We walked together from Moray House, where many of us work in Education and Sport. The route took us along the edge of Holyrood Park with Salisbury Crags above us and a deep blue sky above them. As we stopped for a moment at the bottom of a grassy bank off the main path, a man with an expensive looking camera asked us if we were the butterfly group. On learning that we were in fact in pursuit of hedgehogs, he made his apologies and was quickly on his way. Funny how humans do that, I remarked: separating the natural world into specific species and areas of interest, when of course everything is entangled. Elizabeth asked us if we had seen any hedgehogs recently and the group’s responses were bleak. Some – myself included – had not seen a living, healthy hog since our childhood. Most had seen dead animals on the road in recent months. Only one or two had regular visitors to their gardens in the evenings. We walked on, keen to reach the hedgehog-rich environs of the student halls.
Hedgehog sightings at Pollock Halls, mapped using ArcGIS
As we arrived on site, Elizabeth shared the evidence of prickly presences. This included the most wonderful image I have seen in some time. Using a tunnel rigged with ink and paper, the team had captured a moment of passage – tiny hedgehog footprints left on a crisp white canvas. The reaction of the group to this image was like a gaggle of grandmothers meeting a newborn. Hedgehogs seem to move even the most cynical academic into gushing adoration and this group was far from cynical. We also saw footage from a camera trap. A brief glimpse of a hedgehog as it approached the tunnel, then a badger trying unsuccessfully to squeeze its bulky frame into the small opening, then a fox taking a more aggressive approach. All these residents of Pollock Halls, living here without the exorbitant fees paid by their student co-habitants.
Hedgehog footprints captured in the tunnel, Pollock Halls
In the lead up to the walk, Elizabeth had shared an article with us. Exploring the idea of Storied-Places, Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose (2012) consider a colony of penguins and a flying fox camp in Sydney, Australia. They explore the ways in which ‘these animals understand and render meaningful the places they inhabit’ (p. 1), pointing out that ‘much of what they respond to in the city was not meant for them’ (p. 19). The authors propose an ‘ethics of conviviality’, which would put the burden back on humans, prompting us ‘to find multiple, life enhancing ways of sharing and co-producing meaningful and enduring multispecies cities’ (p. 19). Walking with this idea of a city storied by hedgehogs led us to think differently about the places that we passed through and stopped within. We were becoming attuned to borders and barriers, noting places of safety and vulnerability and imagining ourselves into the lifeworld of the hedgehogs. This enabled a different quality of observation and conversation, and opened up the possibility of creative, experiential modes of enquiry.
For the next part of the session, we gathered in a hidden area of woodland bordering Prestonfield golf course for a workshop activity. I invited the group to work in pairs. One person was tasked with exploring the features of the site that Elizabeth had pointed out and the other would document this investigation with photographs, notes, drawings or diagrams. At this level, the invitation was simple and straightforward, but I also hoped that the group would be up for a slightly more leftfield approach, so I also gave them the option of doing this task slightly differently. The explorer would look around this place as a hedgehog, or at least with hedgehog-like ways of sensing and moving through the site.
The point was not to pretend to be a hedgehog (although that would not be discouraged if anyone wished to take it in that direction). Rather, the idea was to get close to a hedgehog’s way of being here – to crawl through hedges, to feel the leaf litter, to smell the ground. My suggestion was that the designated explorers should try to get a feel for the point at which they were starting to feel uncomfortable and to stay there for a while or try to move beyond it. While these participants attempted to inhabit the site as hedgehogs, the documenting partner had a slightly different role: to observe a non-human presence – passage and dwelling. This might change the nature of the task and raise questions about why we would need to do this, what would it tell us, and what does it mean for the hedgehog who is recorded in this way?
Participants explore the border of the Pollock Halls site or observe and document the process
To my delight, the group embraced this task with openness and enthusiasm. Off they went into the undergrowth, testing routes, feeling their way across the site, plunging hands into leaf litter and taking seriously the possibility of being more hedgehog (or less human) for a moment. For twenty minutes, the group’s engagement with the site seemed to transform into something more playful and experimental, but also more tentative and careful. I watched one hedgehog-participant move down the edge of the site, searching for a passing place perhaps, but not finding an accessible section of the wire fence marking the border. Elizabeth had told us that the ideal habitat range for a hedgehog is 0.9 km², whereas the Pollock Halls site is around a tenth of that. This means that the neighbouring sites make a big difference, and beyond this particular fence the golf course was exposed, over managed, and beyond our reach.
A golfer at Prestonfield golf club, photographed through the inaccessible fence at the border of Pollock Halls
As we came back together to bring the session to a close, participants shared their experiences. One of the explorers said that the task had made him feel very big, and everyone agreed that the shift of scale had been important. We reflected on patterns of movement and the need for shelter, wondered about what could be eaten. The wilder areas of the site felt safe and habitable, but the paved areas between them were dangerous and exposed. The group had enjoyed this task, and felt that it had provided a space and time to foster a more-than-human relationship with the site.
While the discussion continued, I had to leave promptly to catch a train. As I power-walked down South Bridge, dodging tourists and traffic, it struck me how quickly we can return to our frenetic lifestyles. The built-up city centre seemed inhospitable to hedgehogs, and it was easy not to spare them a thought in this part of town. Nevertheless, my afternoon’s encounter at the fringes of the built environment had offered an alternative way of being and thinking that felt hugely important. We might not often see the non-human others who share our cities, but we need to remember that they are here too. The walk and workshop had allowed us to explore an ethics of conviviality that requires a different way of designing, building, managing and inhabiting urban space. The image of the footprints is a powerful emblem for this project, a reminder that others pass where we walk.
References
Cousquer, G., Norris, E., Lurz, P., Vander Meer, E., & Gurnell, J. (2024). Hedgerows for Hedgehogs and Campus Biodiversity: A Prickly Challenge for Universities. Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change 4(1), 101–126.
van Dooren, T., & Bird Rose, D. (2012). Storied-Places in a Multispecies City. Humanimalia 3(2), 1-27.
100 Circles is a new project for Lenzie Moss in Scotland. I am walking round the site 100 times, each time with a different person from the local community, or a visiting artist or researcher. As I share these encounters on this blog, I hope that a co-authored text will emerge, bringing a series of walked dialogues to a wider readership, and perhaps finding a way for the Moss to tell its stories.
This text was written as we attempted to follow Karen Barad (2007) in ‘diffracting’ the contemporary city for an academic article (Cullen et al. 2024). This fragmented narrative is comprised of diverse intra-actions that occurred in the process of learning and teaching on Creating Edinburgh: The interdisciplinary city – an undergraduate course at the University of Edinburgh – including creative responses written by students during the course, photographs of spaces in Edinburgh, which are the focus of course assignments, excerpts from the researchers’ reflections during the research process. Following Barad’s example, we have provided explanatory footnotes, which give context for each fragment.
If you’re reading this, you’re likely facing the screen
Or page
Head on [1]
But if you were standing
On Princes Street in Edinburgh
At the bottom of Lothian Road
Facing East
You’d find the high street on your left
And the gardens on your right
With Edinburgh Castle looming above
There are tourists taking photos
And a group of students exploring the grounds together
Stimulating activity in the same motor-neurological regions as physically enacted movements (Barsalou & Wiemer-Hastings, 2005), reading is an embodied experience which invites not only visual representation, but a broad range of multimodal responses, including any, or a combination of, the five senses, interoceptive reactions, proprioceptive responses and kinaesthetic sensations (Rokotnitz, 2017). In reading the multimodal imagery contained in these fragments the past experiences of research participants, course tutors and researchers with(in) the city ‘flash up’, diffracting spacetimes and “de(con)struct[ing]… the continuum of history… [to bring] the energetics of the past into the present and vice versa” (Barad, 2017, p. 23). The reader is as phenomenologically immersed and materially connected — as entangled – as the participants and researchers.
You walk through the city, across Princes Street, to the New Town.
The infamous statue of Henry Dundas – 1st Viscount Melville – stands 150 feet above St Andrew Square. Between 1791 and 1805, Dundas was Home Secretary, Minister for War and Colonies and First Lord of the Admiralty. He is also argued to have significantly delayed the abolition of slavery.
To begin the Decolonising Edinburgh field week, students are invited to watch a film of Sir Geoff Palmer, interviewed for Edinburgh Futures Institute (2020). Palmer introduces this controversial figure and reflects on strategies of decolonising public monuments. Palmer is Scotland’s first Black professor. He is now Professor Emeritus in the School of Life Sciences at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.
As a result of campaigning by Palmer and others, a new plaque has now been installed at the site. Students visit the monument together to read the new inscription and to critically reflect on the text.
Does the plaque go far enough? Do you feel that the statue should be removed? If so, should something else be put in its place?
The Researcher [2]
You arrive.
Waverly North Bridge.
Unable to discern the students
From other passers-by.
An approach:
Are you…?
Yes!
Smiles.
Introductions.
Research Ethics.
Expectations.
Invitations.
Phones out.
Recorders on.
You follow,
Neither a part
Nor apart.
Liminal.
Present.
You observe.
You reflect.
You diffract,
Becoming
Complicit
And in doing so
You are irrevocably
Entangled,
Altering the experience
Fundamentally.
What does it mean
To be here?
To inhabit,
To embody,
To be of
A city,
And for a city
To be of you?
Questions structure the discussion in the seminar room. Tutors facilitate the exchange of ideas between students, drawing out tensions and contradictions, prompting intra-action. The ‘tools’ that tutors use might be understood in Baradian terms, although they have yet to be framed explicitly in this way. Students share the documents and outputs of their field work, which are then explored by students in other groups. Questions are invited to turn experiences over and over, troubling binaries and opening up reflections into new, generative responses. This includes the creation of new field topics, which are submitted for assessment as digital portfolios comprising images, maps, tasks and questions. As Karen Spector argues, ‘If nothing new that matters is produced, then diffraction hasn’t occurred’ (2015, 449). With a topic as contested and emotive as decolonising monuments, diffraction might be utilised more explicitly as a way to read meanings through each other, without the pressure to move towards resolution. The ethics of diffractive pedagogy are informed by feminist theorists such as Donna Haraway, who argues that ‘it matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories’ (2016, 12). Creating Edinburgh emphasises the ways in which learning and teaching matters to the city and its continual creation through stories, journeys and intra-actions.
If you had been in this exact spot some years ago, a PPE (personal protective equipment) mask may have obstructed your peripheral view
Students on the inaugural version of Creating Edinburgh sat in cold seminar rooms (windows open for air circulation even in the winter). Pandemic Edinburgh has never been a popular field topic.[3]
‘I’ was teaching two seminars that year
Each week, I greeted students as they filtered in, sitting in their groups
“How was your fieldwork?”
“Where did you go?”
“What did you see?”[4]
Years later Creating Edinburgh found its way into my PhD Manuscript:
The figure of the witch has been a constant companion to my PhD process. In my final semester of teaching at the University of Edinburgh, I was working on a brand-new course called ‘Creating Edinburgh’.[5] The course design loosely mimics a ‘choose your own adventure’ novel, wherein the students opt for certain topics from a list of offerings at the beginning of the semester. The course is an interdisciplinary approach to the city of Edinburgh itself and engages with themes like, ‘Decolonising Edinburgh’, ‘Digital Edinburgh’, ‘Literary Edinburgh’, ‘Deep Time Edinburgh’ etc. The main assessment for the course is for students to create their own theme to be added to the cache for future cohorts. One of my groups chose to pursue Witchcraft Edinburgh, and it is to them I owe much of my knowledge about witch hunts in Scotland. Thank you, Eleanor, Aimee, Sadie, and Andrew. It is because of them that I learned that the Mercat Cross located in the market centre of Medieval Edinburgh served as an execution site for accused witches. According to a plaque at The Witches Well, a memorial to those accused of witchcraft in Scotland between 1563-1736, hundreds of witches were publicly executed during this time. The plaque was placed in 1912, and states,
This fountain, erected by John Duncan, R.S.A., is near the site on which many witches were burned at the stake. The wicked head and serene head signify that some used their exceptional knowledge for evil purposes while others were misunderstood and wished their kind nothing but good. The serpent has the dual significance of evil and wisdom.
Witches then, were condemned regardless of which direction they aimed their powers; ‘the “good witch”, who made sorcery her career, was also punished, often more severely’ (Federici, 2004, 200). This lack of discrimination concerning the morality of witches is perplexing; if witches were not hunted and killed for their wickedness, what were they persecuted for?
The situatedness of this knowledge struck me, as I had been working with the text, Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation for years and had not investigated the history of witch trials in Edinburgh, the city in which I lived and studied in.
Witchcraft Edinburgh [6]
Artistic Edinburgh
Literary Edinburgh
Music Edinburgh
Deadinburgh
Eatinburgh
Haunted Edinburgh
Legendary Edinburgh
Queer Edinburgh
For their final assessment, students work in groups to create their own field topic. These are then made available as an open educational resource on the University’s website so that they can be accessed publicly and used by students on subsequent years of the course, as a re-turning of practice. The course avoids closing down the experience into interpretive or analytical assignments. Rather, new experiences are generated, new paths are followed, new questions are raised. The questions that students have asked through this assessment task exemplify the kind of diffractive approach that we are advocating in this article. Barad’s argument about the inseparability of entangled phenomena tells us that ‘separability is not taken for granted and this means that all phenomena—all the entanglements—are open to analysis and questioning’ (Barad & Gandorfer 2021, 51). Applying this principle to an educational experience in the city suggests that the questions that are asked (which includes the prior questions that structure the fieldwork on the course) matter to Edinburgh. This is because active questioning ensures that multiple components are kept open, malleable, subject to change. This is the meaning of the course subtitle, ‘the interdisciplinary city’.
Does the surrounding area reflect what we have learned about Edinburgh and its level of safety for the LQBTQ community?
How are educational institutions and their buildings important for a city other than just as classrooms?
How does food serve as a social tool in this community?
Why are ghost stories ingrained in Edinburgh, and how might they add to the culture of the city?
Because diffraction is an ongoing process, these questions are not only about a specific encounter with the city of Edinburgh: they also have the potential to shape ways of being, thinking, relating in other contexts.
The majority of students on the course are exchange or international visiting students [7]
After weeks of oscillating between seminar room and fieldwork, they would return to their country of study or home
What did they bring with them? What did they leave behind?
Were they changed by Edinburgh? Is Edinburgh changed by them?
Perhaps they did not return. They re-turned.
There are things about which
We educators and researchers
Have no knowledge,
No control.
What was happening
In the ‘margins’ of the students’
Lives?
Living as they were
Beyond the parameters of
This ‘Creating Edinburgh’.
Learning as they were
Beyond the boundaries of
This ‘Education’.
How to divest oneself
Of the assumed responsibility
Of the learning and knowing
Of others?
Vital contemplation.
You peer down a nearby close (those narrow, steep alleyways branching off the Royal Mile)
And you feel the wind rush through it, over you
It’s particles and physics
[1] These fragments were co-created in the spring of 2024 by authors Clare Cullen and M Winter, each drawing on their own experiences with the city of Edinburgh and the course. The latter fragments specifically refer to Cullen’s walking intraview with students on their field work.
[2] This fragment, written by Clare Cullen, captures her experience accompanying students on their field work in the autumn of 2023. The researcher’s presence-participation in students’ fieldwork with(in) the city was an integral part of our methodology. Weaving an autoethnographic fragment of the researcher’s fieldwork experiences into the tapestry of this entanglement reveals the messy liveliness of diffractive research. It does not obscure the essential administrative, ethical and logistical elements that might bookend a data collection intervention — those research protocols that exist beyond the boundaries of the data and yet fundamentally influence the experiences captured within those recordings. It acknowledges what is gained through researcher presence-participation, and what is sacrificed: a firsthand, embodied understanding of the multisensory phenomena that coalesce to create a city at the cost of influencing the students’ experiences by introducing a factor that would otherwise not have been present.
[3] Barad follows Walter Benjamin in exploring the disruptive potential of ‘a superposition of times – moments from the past – existing in the thick-now of the present moment’ (2017, 33). For Barad, this is understood through the notion of temporal diffraction, noting how an electron can co-exist at different temporal, as well as spatial, locations. While the Pandemic Edinburgh topic is not a popular choice (perhaps because this is not a temporal location that students have any desire to re-turn to), Creating Edinburgh was designed and developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Pandemic time is therefore superimposed in the present moment through a troubling of digital/physical binaries and the traces of the disrupted learning experience that characterised the inaugural year of the course. Deeper time is also superimposed on the present, as students are invited to encounter the city at a geological scale. Searching for evidence of geological processes in the city, students are asked to identify traces in the materials and shapes of the urban landscape.
[4] This section, written by M Winter, describes their experience teaching on the inaugural version of Creating Edinburgh in 2021.
[5] This is an excerpt from M Winter’s PhD thesis.
[6] A list of topics added to the cache by students over the past few years.
[7] This section was co-created by Clare Cullen and M Winter, diffracting their varied experiences as researcher and teacher.
References
Barad, K (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press, Durham.
Barad, K. (2017) What Flashes Up: Theological-Political-Scientific Fragments. In: Keller, C and Rubenstein M-J (eds) Entangled Worlds. Fordham University Press, New York pp. 21–88.
Barad K, Gandorfer D (2021) Political Desirings: Yearnings for mattering (,) differently. Theory & Event, 24(1), 14-66.
Barsalou LW, Wiemer-Hastings K (2005) “Situating Abstract Concepts.” In Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking, edited by Diana Pecher D, Zwaan RA. 129 – 63 (New York: Cambridge University Press).
BBC (2024) Council installs new slavery plaque at Edinburgh’s Melville Monument, 18 March 2024. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-68597359. Accessed 28 Mar 2024.
Cullen, C., Jay, D., Overend, D. et al. (2024) Creating Edinburgh: diffracting interdisciplinary learning and teaching in the contemporary city. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11, 1151.
Edinburgh Futures Institute (2020) Shadow on the street: Edinburgh’s links with the slave trade. Film by McFall L and AWED (Goss S, McFall L, Umney D, Moats D). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrx5yQnx6QM. Accessed 28/03/24.
Federici S (2004) Caliban and the witch: Women, the body and primitive accumulation. Autonomedia, Brooklyn, NY
Haraway D (2016) Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, Durham.
Rokotnitz N (2017) “Goosebumps, Shivers, Visualization, and Embodied Resonance in the Reading Experience: The God of Small Things”, Poetics Today 38:2. DOI 10.1215/03335372-3868603.
Spector K (2015) Meeting pedagogical encounters halfway. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 58(6): 447–450.
This text was written between 7th and 11th May 2024 as a group of artists and scientists followed salmon down the River Spey in Scotland.
Image by Marie-Chantal Hamrock for Waterways
1. Nursery
First activity
Moments of vitality
Possible futures
We are at Ballintean Mountain Lodge in the Cairngorms. An interdisciplinary collective, comprised of scientists, artists and artist-scientists, working together for the first time. For the next four days we will follow salmon as they make their first careful movements away from the redds – the matrix of eggs and gravel, where they have spent the winter. In these nurturing waters, the fry sense their environment from a place of stony sanctuary: moving up through the sediment as they seek the light. And, as the water warms in the springtime sunshine, they begin to tentatively look around, seek out new territories, and interact with their neighbours.
2. Refuge
The changing strata
Enclaves of time, for dwelling
Necessary space
The lodge and its grounds are immaculate. It takes time to bed in – to feel comfortable enough to sink into the upholstered sofas to sink into the deep, cold water and find space to hide. There is an alternative sense of time and place here: that which Michel Foucault called a heterotopia – a place, other. Other than the habitual routines of everyday life. How can we use this space? As we moved down the River Feshie, we encountered a radical shift in the waterway: from wide and dynamic to deep and constrained. This location is important for returning salmon. There is less of a surface for the sun to heat the water, so large, tired fish can wait down in the dark and the cold. Waiting for the right time to resume their homeward journey.
3. Holding Bays
Risky strategy
Suddenly changed behaviour
With no reference points
After an evening of introductions and exchanges, after a day or two of acclimatising and absorbing, there is a shift in our activity. I ask the group to create a response to the site or the salmon or the story-so-far. This feels like a different way of working, which is at once a small thing – a simple thing – but also a journey into unknown territories without the same way-markers or signposts. Loch Insh is small and poses fewer challenges than larger bodies of water. Nevertheless, in these places of pike and perch and trout, the newly silvered smolts are vulnerable. They will find safety in numbers, and shoaling behaviour begins. Weaving together experiences, movements, senses, words, ideas, hopes. We might get somewhere like this.
4. Flow
Real sense of movement
Just let the journey take place
And stop holding on
We are on our way now. Sometimes, we will be moved along in fast sections. There will be waterfalls, dams. They don’t turn and actively swim: they let the water take them. Sometimes, the river will move slower, and we will push on. What will that effort cost us? And along the way, we smolts – cryptic critters – will never stop feeding. Ingesting everything that we encounter as this flow moves us on. On towards wider, wilder waters. On towards salty seas. We will grow fat. We will travel vast distances. We will live through all this, only if we are very, very lucky. And then, one day, we will turn. And we will return. Over and over for as long as you will allow.
5. The Beat
Onto the highway
Something of a rhythm now
Nocturnal drifters
We are in a drastically different environment today. Moving downstream at varying paces, just as others (who are further on in their journeys) pass us, going the other way. Is there any interaction between the wee smolts and the sea-hardened veterans? A passing glance, perhaps? At this point in the river, the banks are fixed and manicured. Anglers’ nets hang at intervals; well-stocked huts for high-price spots. But this is not management of the waterway. It is riparian gardening. A little further up, where the water runs a little faster, unruly flora cling to natural islets and the pathway needs greater care and surer foot. Smolts and brown trout jostle for position, snatching the stonefly from the space between the elements.
6. Detour
A cul-de-sac turn
This can only go so far
Fall back to go on
Turning away from the Spey, we follow a new path as it winds through riverwoods to the falls. Here, the salmon drop back to spawn. They might make the initial leap, if they cared to attempt it. But the second would outdo them. Better to recognise the limits of our ambitions. Salmon have been known to travel miles, only to rethink, retreat – even past the salt wedge – to try another route. No point putting good money after bad. And after all this, if there is somewhere else that we want to go on to, something else that we want to achieve, then it might be helpful to remember that there are other ways to get there. There are other routes to take.
7. Estuary
Productive places
For those who survived this far
Silvery speed run
As they approach this threshold, up to 40% are lost. Three of our group have travelled south by the time we reach Spey Bay. An ecotone – a meeting point between two ecosystems – represented by the wedge of salt water that cuts underneath the fresh. As the winds and tides churn away, one world collapses into the other. The confident hold of the osprey, the oily squeak of the terns, the ostentatious landing of the swans. The smolts wait for the right time – the night time – to become post smolts. And they make a break for it, riding the ebbing tide and escaping their riverworld. Where will this trajectory take us?
8. Sea
A shift in scale, now
On past continental shelf
Futures possible
Actively swimming. Seeking deeper worlds and distant feeding grounds. Somewhere in the south Norwegian sea, at the edge of the shelf, others join the journey. From green to blue, Britain to Greenland. What are the reference points when we can only look out and imagine? How do we find our way? Currents affording speed and suggesting direction; river water slowly giving way to salinity; depth; magnetism. These piscine psychogeographers can follow flow. Can we flow with them?
Waterways was conceived as a group of artists and scientists interested in the interconnected and entangled existence of various species. Our starting point was the Atlantic salmon, described by Dr Colin Bull as ‘in crisis’ due to multiple factors including deterioration of its habitat, warming waters, and risks of predators in both river and marine environments. The salmon as both fish and cultural symbol is key to many Scottish communities and Waterways initial residency sought to try to understand this through focusing on specific parts of the journey, the River Feshie and River Spey then on to Spey Bay on the North East coast of Scotland. Initial questions included: How can we foster interdisciplinary approaches to salmon conservation? How can creative methods respond to migratory journeys, tracing, tracking and as far as possible, travelling with wild salmon? In order to understand these questions we looked to the salmon life cycle, and to the salmon themselves. What were the stories of the salmon? How could we understand them through their connection to place and their epic journey?
Light and oxygen, sand, algae, a moving environment, dynamic, the gravel provides a trap, a home, a refuge, a nest. Sight of the first salmon, an inch in length.
A deep crevasse between two walls of rock, they hide in the depths, at the bottom, the bedrock.
It’s a story of:
stonefly
beavers
mayfly
kingfishers
herons
osprey
freshwater pearl mussels
When they are bigger, they are more vulnerable, more likely to be found, there is safety in this zone.
It’s a story of:
Autumn
Winter
Spring
Summer
Autumns
Winters
Springs
The grassy tufts are trying to become the gravel shelves, the eggs are trying to become alevin, the alevin are trying to become parr, the parr are trying to become smolt, the smolts are trying to become adults, the adults are trying to spawn. Resistance and surrender, becoming and unbecoming under the water, unseen.
Some drop down into the main river. There is a coastal stream of food into this new environment, new reference points, new risks. Smoltification begins, silvering fish group together, there is safety in numbers.
Barriers, hydrodams, track and truck means losing the thread of the smell. How to remember where you have not been? How to trace scent where you have not travelled? Working to find a way out, tail first into the white foam.
It’s a story of:
eggs
alevin
fry
parr
smolt
adult
spawning
At the coast they stop feeding, stomach’s empty, but body memory remains. The stress of the mother seeps into her eggs, her trauma their legacy.
Upper catchment: River Feshie (Spey tributary) & Loch Insh
Day 1. I wake early and run with Colin down the river to Feshiebridge. After breakfast, we walk down through blackthorn and birch to the braided channels and shingle of the River Feshie. Laura leads an “orientation exercise”, something unfamiliar to me – eyes closed, moving and stretching the body, grounding the feet, awareness of sounds, smells, sensations – that leaves me feeling vulnerable and awkward. I wonder how the others feel and where this discomfort comes from. I focus on the feeling of airflow around my hand and wonder if water flow feels similar over the skin of salmon parr holding station against the river current. The fry and parr face into the current, beating their fast little lives against it. When they smolt, they cede the battle, turn and face downstream, drift and swim. This image strikes deep; it is painful to consider the possibility of turn and release from the struggle to be enough.
We discuss the early life stages of the salmon and explore the shingle, side pools and river. We scoop with a net and turn pebbles to uncover stonefly, mayfly, beetles. I find a dried-out log with a salmon’s hooked jaw. I try to just be and feel but can’t escape the urge to catalogue, to name and list the wildlife, the sensations. [sand martins, dipper, pied wagtail, crow, buzzard]
We walk on to Feshiebridge with its deep pools for adult salmon to sink into. [orange tip butterfly, newt]
After lunch we go to Loch Insch. Salmon entering this wide loch must find their way out through the narrow exit at Kincraig. A kilometre further down is where the Feshie flows into the Spey. [osprey on nest, goldeneye, mallard, sandpiper, greylag geese, crow, buzzard, pigeon, wigeon, orange tip butterfly, peacock butterfly] How do they find their way out? How do they know when and how to smolt? In a way, they reinvent anew with every generation what it means to be salmon because they don’t have a cultural map. They find their way in the way that feels right. We have expectations of our future through knowledge imparted to us by others who have already gone this way. Salmon experience expectation in a totally different way, through urges and instinct. Does this mean they are freer and more adaptable than humans? Do they have a greater capacity for reimagining? Unguided but also unconstrained and unburdened by social knowledge and expectations? What does this mean for us, now, when we have to reimagine how to be human in a world whose ecological integrity is starting to unravel?
In the evening, we share our thoughts and words from the day. This is again uncomfortable, and I wonder how much of myself I have hidden that this feels so exposing.
Day 2. Again I run to Feshiebridge, being happy to stay by the river rather than seek out a new route. The river is silver and the fringing birch trees luminous in the early morning light. I startle a hare drinking at a shallow pool. I want to run fast but the narrow, foot-worn path forces me into an awkward gait. I briefly wonder if the rewilded future will contain any smooth ways. I move off the track and realise the grassy overgrowth itself better holds my feet.
[cuckoo, willow warbler, siskin, chaffinch, crow, song thrush]
Middle course: Aberlour
Day 3. I dream vividly and wake to the dawn chorus, needing more sleep but reluctant to shut the window. I walk to the Feshie and enjoy the colours in the early morning light but don’t scramble down the bank to peer into the water or lift stones.
After breakfast we go to Aberlour where the Spey has become something very different – wide, manicured and very appealing to anglers. Down at the river, we speak about angling, catch and release, knotless nets, the ambiguous status of trout, river gardening and the constrained flow. I feel detached – from the river, from the day. We discuss climate change, warming rivers, smolt run phenology and the potential uncoupling of evolved migration cues from encountered marine conditions. [crows, jackdaw, yellow wagtail, magpie, mallards]
We walk upstream to the suspension bring and watch a rotating dance of anglers. Someone asks, why do they fish for salmon? I am struck by this ubiquitous question of the outsider, that can only be asked of anything by someone from a nonintersecting world, and wonder how the anglers themselves would respond. They aren’t detached. They have quite literal lines of communication with the river, with the salmon.
We trail through wild garlic scented woodland to a rocky perch above the river and watch the dark swirling surface. I enjoy the shedding of tiny eddies from larger ones. Fish keep surfacing with a plop but are gone by the time to turn to look and I don’t stare at any one patch of water long enough to see them. Matthew does, and sees several; he also films underwater. In scientific observation, how do we know when we’ve watched for long enough?
I feel like I can’t find a way in, to the river, to the salmon, to the day. Detached. Is this why people fish, to pluck the unknowable out of the darkness and force it to “shake hands” with us, confront, see and know us? Is this why we are uncomfortable with rewilding? The new wilderness might give nonhumans too many places to elude us. The water feels impenetrable compared with the clear shallows of yesterday’s Feshie where we could see fully to the bottom, turn stones and glimpse the inhabitants. If we can’t find a way in, a way of seeing in, do we believe there’s anything there, do we care?
I watch sandpipers. One, pipping, zips a straight line upstream. Three, pipping more so, chase each other in zigzags. They don’t seem to want a way in. (I later look up how sandpipers feed: they hunt prickly bugs by sight on the ground or in shallow water, so indeed they don’t need a way into the deeper water.)
Sitting at the edge of conversation, I hear warblers on the opposite bank. Unsure which, I ask BirdNet, a machine learning bird song recognition app. Black cap, it tells me, then wavers – Whitethroat? These birds sound very different. Has the incursion of even gentle respectful human voices into the recording made the song cryptic to BirdNet, or is the whitethroat there too and cryptic to me? I am restless to move on and find some attachment to this day.
[sandpipers, red kite, magpie, yellow wagtail, black cap]
We walk up the Burn of Aberlour to waterfalls. Salmon come this way but may not make it up the highest fall. Marie and I discuss the definition and etymology of the word “matrix” and I feel the need to understand how the mathematical definition fits in. My research involves finding a salmon post-smolt’s path through n-dimensional matrices of biophysical ocean model data. I wonder what questions an artist would ask of my data.
I want to swim but feel awkward and settle for dangling my feet in the peaty water, enjoying the different textures (turbulent, laminar, bubbly, still) on my toes. The cold water is refreshing but still doesn’t connect me to the day.
Laura and I wonder what the human equivalents are of salmon’s unlearnt knowledge (instincts, gut feelings, innate responses). Are we such a social species that we’ve lost all our useful instincts, downloaded them to the cultural cannon? (I think about cultures and yoghurt cultures and how cultured things are easier to digest).
I think about how our salmon population “box” models map onto this multifaceted riverine landscape. They seem such an inadequate representation. Our smooth-sided boxes leave nowhere for the salmon to hide. Lack of complexity hinders accurate representation of processes, e.g. coexistence theory. We need to recognise the right level of complexity – the number of niches or modes of being that the landscape wants to split into, the number of boxes needed to catch the salmon. Rewilding is about allowing mess and complexity.
River mouth: Spey Bay
Day 4. On the last day at Ballintean we head outside to trace, draw and map. I trace the surroundings of Ballintean from the OS map – braided river, roads, forest – and add all our wildlife observations.
We spend a beautiful couple of hours back at the braided Feshie. (Is this the Feshie, or is that the Feshie? It’s all the Feshie.) I enjoy eddy dimples shedding off an exposed boulder and fish tail-like hazy green fronds flicking in the flow. All that complex motion – eddying surface, undulating weed fronds, river riffles – is mesmerising and satisfying. Today I am connected. There’s a small salmonid, impossible to say whether salmon or trout, nestled against its Favourite Rock. It’s still but with fast beating gills. How long will it patiently stay there and is it aware of being observed?
We drive off down the Spey. Satnav tries to persuade us to divert but we stick with the Speyside road for our journey to the river mouth. Spey Bay is at its finest in the sunshine. We wander up to the Garmouth viaduct, usually so magical, but it feels like we are all dragging our heels and yearning for the sea – we are heading in the wrong direction. We turn round and go out onto the shingle. Neil and I wonder what processes made and maintain this massive shingle bed; I suspect a combination of relict and active. We all feel this site is a world of danger for the smolts. How can they rush past all the hazards, like the fleet of sawbill ducks currently lurking in the river mouth, for their shot at marine life? When they smolt, are they aware of the dangers ahead?
[terns, osprey, eider, diver, greater black backed gulls, other gulls, a fleet of mergansers in the river mouth, small flitty waders, crows, orange tip butterflies]
Day 5. We meet again at Spey Bay, me with family in tow. We sit looking out at the narrow river mouth and wide sea and try to imagine the post-smolts’ ongoing journey – migration paths, cues, salinity gradients, shelf and shelf edge and beyond. The complexity and completeness of Spey Bay’s multifaceted environment, of our journey, are satisfying. And yet the journey is unfinished. How do we follow the salmon further?
As we leave Spey Bay, I realise that today I am attached and calm in a slow unphilosophical way. Later, I think about how the journey and life stages of the salmon are so varied in pace. Metabolism doesn’t always match with their pace of life. Eggs. Slow swelling, oxygen washed, stuck patient. Fry. Fast beating, rock attached. Parr. Station-holding, current-facing. Smolts. River racing, danger evading, urgent travelling. Post-smolts. Release seeking, frantic bursting out into salt water.
A walk with Elaine Rainey (Scottish Badgers), Glen Cousquer (University of Edinburgh) and others at Boghall Burn by the University’s Easter Bush Campus, by the Pentlands. We are working towards a paper on ‘Embracing the 30×30 biodiversity challenge on veterinary campuses’.
We encounter various barriers this morning.
The entrance to the Vet School is locked, so I wait for someone to access the building with their card and surreptitiously follow them inside. Already a trespasser.
A travelling community had moved their caravans into the overflow carpark and, as they had begun to enter the building, a heavy-handed lockdown was in place.
I thought about this policing of space as we walked towards the burn.
We pass a hedgerow and peer into its tangled branches to see the plastic guards and chicken wire. This hedge was not so hedgehog friendly, but Elaine suggested that badgers could probably pass over the metal barriers without much bother.
Glen asks us to pause before we cross the threshold into the site and reads ‘Walk Slowly’ by Danna Faulds:
The harsh voice
of judgment drops to a whisper and I
remember again that life isn’t a relay
race; that we will all cross the finish
line; that waking up to life is what we
were born for.
We follow the path through the mixed woodland and note how the new birch trees are still bound in plastic.
Other saplings are surviving the roe deer’s passage without the need for such protection.
The inaccessibility of this muddy, steep winding path, which crosses the burn over rickety bridges, means that we need to be mobile as we negotiate the shifting terrain.
Not everybody would be able to come with us.
The whole site is a lesson in inclusions and exclusions: we need to protect this place and prevent the new housing development from bringing too many people into a fragile ecology.
But welcoming in, rather than keeping out, sits better with our aspirations and ethos.
Can this site be an enclosure and an exclosure at the same time?
As the geographer Doreen Massey has suggested, ‘multiplicity, antagonisms and contrasting temporalities are the stuff of all places’ (2005, 159). There are therefore no hard and fast rules, and universal politics are not possible:
The issue is one of power and politics as refracted through, and often actively manipulating space and place, not one of general ‘rules’ of space and place. For there are no such rules, in the sense of a universal politics of abstract spatial forms; of topographic categories. Rather, there are spatialised social practices and relations, and social power. (…) It is a genuinely political position-taking not the application of a formula about space and place. (166)
Opening or closing space is not necessarily good and bad respectively, and the same arguments have been used by the Left for protecting the territories of small tribes (closing space) and accepting immigrants through a freer border control (opening space). Likewise, unequal power relations can result in both openness and closure of space by a complex interplay of ‘settledness and flow’ (174). So, ‘simply saying “no” to nation, home, boundaries and so forth is not in itself a political advance (it is spatial fetishism to think it will be)’ (174).
As we walk back through the wood and return to the campus, we have passed multiple barriers.
But we need to leave many in place, to maintain them, to create them.
After all, life is not a race. We can be slowed, prevented from progressing, stopped…
In the end, ‘we will all cross the finish line’
References:
Faulds, Danna, ‘Walk Slowly’, in Go In and In: Poems from the Heart of Yoga, Peaceable Kingdom Books, 2002.
Massey, Doreen, For Space, London: SAGE Publications, 2005
This text was performed in August and October 2023 at the Stand Comedy Club in Edinburgh as part of the Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas. It is an argument for interdisciplinary collaboration, with some stories of Making Routes fieldwork at Knepp Castle Estate and Gully Cave.
Joke
Hi. I’d like to start with a joke. Seems appropriate…
A scientist, a geographer and an artist walk into a bar…
The barman asks them what they want and:
The scientist asks for an aqueous solution of ethanol, sugars, amino acids, minerals, flavonoids, and other organic compounds, resulting from chemical reactions of mashing, boiling, and fermentation. [he doesn’t get out much]
The geographer orders the product of the skilled labour of farmers and artisan brewers, who cultivate local and global ingredients deriving from diverse environmental factors. [she doesn’t get out much, either]
The artist requests a liquid celebration, a symphony of flavours that dance upon the tongue, a frothy masterpiece that delights the senses and elevates the spirit. [he gets out too much]
And the barman looks at them all blankly for a moment, then says ‘so that’ll be three pints of beer, then?’
Ok, so it wasn’t a funny joke. But if you’re here expecting an hour of comedy, you’ve maybe misread the blurb…
And something comedians never do is analyse their own jokes (unless you’re Stewart Lee). But my background is in theatre and performance studies, so I can’t help it.
I want to note that moment when the barman looks at these disciplinary characters ‘blankly’.
[Some of you are looking at me quite blankly right now]
That moment of blankness is what often happens when specialists forget that they spend most of their time up their own arses.
But I want to suggest that this space of not quite getting each other – of misunderstandings and miscommunications, between people who don’t usually talk to each other – holds tremendous potential for transformational change.
When we generate, organise, categorise, and share knowledge, so much of our efforts go into eliminating those spaces of perplexed bafflement from our work.
My suggestion is that we actually need to embrace them and cultivate them. This talk is going to tell you how to do that.
Field
I’m standing in a field in West Sussex.
There is a gentle rain creating ripples in a dark pond. Oak trees shed their acorns. A herd of cows – long horned mega beasts – stare at us from afar. Purple emperor butterflies flit about the tangled wildflowers. A cacophony of birdsong – blue tits, robins, blackcaps. Rabbits bound through the hedgerow. Buzzards circle overhead.
And the reason I’m standing in this field is that I’ve invited a group of scientists, geographers, and artists to work together for a couple of days at an experimental rewilding site.
My idea is that if these people spend some time together, exploring their different takes on nature and conservation – then something else will emerge. Something that we don’t yet understand or recognise. Something that might change the way we think about the world and our place within it.
And one of the group – a Quaternary Scientist at Royal Holloway, University of London – looks at me blankly for a moment and says ‘What do you actually want us to do?’
Can I have a volunteer to play the part of this scientist?
You don’t have to do much – just join me up here and read aloud from this short script, so only come up if you’re comfortable doing that in front of all these people!
Script 1
Scientist: What do you actually want us to do?
David: Um… well, I’m hoping that will emerge as we work together here.
Scientist: How are we going to do that, though?
David: Well, I thought we could use some of the methods from my training as a theatre director and collaborative performance-maker to – you know – explore the more-than-human world here and kind of… create an assemblage of ecological practice…
Scientist: Right.
David: So, maybe we could start by just finding a place to sit and writing a little response to the things you observe there – like, the sounds and the feeling of being here – that sort of thing.
Scientist: Ok. How many words?
David: Well, there’s no word limit as such.
Scientist: So we can just write whatever we want?
David: Yes. And then, if you’re comfortable to do so, we might read those to each other and then see if we can weave them together somehow – create a kind of multi-authored text from our time here? It could even include some movement if you wanted.
Scientist: Yep.
David: Does that sound ok?
Scientist: … I think I’m going to need an aqueous solution of ethanol, sugars, amino acids, minerals, flavonoids, and other organic compounds, resulting from the chemical reactions of mashing, boiling, and fermentation.
Rewilding
Rewilding requires a willingness to let go of some of the things that we think we know.
I was drawn to it because it offers a new way of working that moves us into a radical space of possibility, in which we don’t know how to behave, we have no language to explain what is happening, and we just have to trust in messy, unpredictable processes.
That is not how most of us currently work.
But I do think things are changing.
Word
There’s a word that has surreptitiously infiltrated the modern university: sneaking its way along dusty, book-lined corridors; slipping into shiny new research laboratories; and even cementing itself into renovation and construction projects across campuses. It is a word that threatens the very foundations of higher education. It demands new ways of working and raises difficult questions about how we should work together, share ideas, and respond to the big challenges facing our world today.
That word is… [any guesses?]… ‘interdisciplinary’.
I want to take up the offer of interdisciplinarity and suggest that we all need to become less disciplined – that’s my dangerous idea.
Shaking off the mantle of traditional, discipline-bound knowledge, I want to suggest that the only way to respond to an increasingly complex and challenging world is to stop playing by the rules. We need creative, experimental, and messy spaces where new approaches can be developed.
I’m going to take you into another of these messy spaces now.
Cave
You’re in a cave in the Mendips in Somerset. The cave mouth faces west with far-reaching views over a gorge and westwards across the flat floodplain of a river. The ground is covered in bright blue tarpaulin. You are at an excavation site, where the scientists have discovered bones, teeth, and fragments from tens of thousands of mammals and birds. It is raining. Wild pony, auroch, arctic fox, wolf, and hyena all lived here once. Your encounter with deep time makes you feel sick.
When I visited this place in November 2021, I brought some of the same collaborators with me, who worked together in the field in West Sussex.
It was encouraging that they had come back.
What made this place quite different from the rewilding site was absence.
In the field, we had seen the pigs, cows, butterflies, and oaks.
Here we encountered an unassuming opening in a cliff face that had been hollowed out over a decade of careful excavation work.
I really needed to understand more about what I was seeing.
Ok, now I need another volunteer – same deal, you’re playing the part of a geographer.
Script 2
Geographer: The cave was filled with a red, limestone-rich deposit, which accumulated through the inwashing of material down the gully above and through a large fissure feature within the cave roof. This was then capped by a densely-cemented carbonate flowstone, sealing the deposits below. That essentially created a deep time memory box for us to discover…
David: … Wow!
Geographer: The breccia has proved to be richer with fossils than we ever could have imagined. So much evidence of past inhabitation and clues to their behaviours, which can inform our understanding of future conservation possibilities.
David: Amazing!
Geographer: What we’re seeing here is a window into the Quaternary. I’m sure you’ll have loads of thoughts about how we can work together to understand all this.
David: Just… Wow. It’s er… vast, isn’t it?
Geographer: What’s your initial response? To what you’re seeing here?
David: … er… Wow. It makes me think… um… It’s amazing.
Geographer: … I’m going to need the product of the skilled labour of farmers and artisan brewers, who cultivate local and global ingredients deriving from diverse environmental factors.
Final
Thank you to our geographer. Thank you to our scientist.
And that leaves me, I suppose. The artist.
On the walk back from this cave through the gorge, I shared my worries with one of the participants, Helen.
I said that I felt a bit overwhelmed by the scale of what we had just encountered.
I said that this didn’t feel like the right time for our usual methods and experiments.
And Helen replied: ‘You have to breathe in to breathe out’.
I think that’s the most difficult part of all this: spending time together, sharing ideas and experiences, learning from each other, and then very slowly starting to find ways to collaborate.
We need to resist the urge to know everything and control everything.
We need to let a little more wildness into the process.
And that’s where I think art and creativity have a lot to offer.
Entering into these unknown and perhaps unknowable spaces, I have felt challenged, bewildered, moved, and inspired.
What I was able to do was then channel those experiences into very small scale, tentative responses…
Creative writing, performed actions, makeshift films, and installations – these offered me ways to bring together the disparate perspectives and responses of the participants.
Art became a glue holding it all together. Or rather, a thread, weaving things together.
For me, it unlocked something quite profound – an insight into a wilder, messier, unpredictable world that exists outside the academy, and of which we are all a part.
That doesn’t need discipline.
Perhaps we can talk about that for a bit.
Then you can join me for a liquid celebration, a symphony of flavours that dance upon the tongue, a frothy masterpiece that delights the senses and elevates the spirit.
Figure 1: Publicity image for Merchant City Heritage Walk (Glasgow Women’s Library): façade of Glasgow Maternity Hospital at Rottenrow
It is a hot Saturday afternoon in early June when my mother-in-law, daughter and I make our way to the site of the former Royal Maternity Hospital in Rottenrow for a Women of the Merchant City Heritage Walk run by Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL). The library, based on Landressy Street close to Bridgeton Cross in the East End of Glasgow, is the only accredited museum dedicated to women’s history in the UK and has an impressive collection recognised as of national significance. Volunteers (or ‘history detectives’ as they call themselves), research and deliver a range of Women’s Heritage Walks in Glasgow. The most recent one in May 2023 was a new walk through the Gorbals and there are also a range of Suffrage Walks as part of the programme. The aim is to make Glasgow’s women’s history visible, and to tell the stories of women who have had an impact on the city and beyond.
In Where are the Women? (2021), Sara Sheridan claims that our sense of self and where we come from is not confined to history books (2021: 7) arguing that if women don’t see themselves represented in the world around them, the message that girls and women receive is that ‘their stories, and indeed achievements, don’t matter’ (ibid.). Sheridan notes that in her home city of Edinburgh there are more statues of animals than there are of women, and she embarks on an imagining of a Scotland that maps the achievements of women, celebrating their lives and making them visible. In The Feminist City (2021), Leslie Kern argues that ‘physical places like cities matter when we want to think about social change’ (2021: 14), but as Rebecca Solnit reminds us, walking the city streets is not equal: ‘Women have routinely been punished and intimidated for attempting that most simple of freedoms, taking a walk’ (Solnit, 2001: 234). These two elements; of accessing women’s invisible histories, and the act of taking a walk in the city which has for women often been constructed as ‘performance rather than transport’ (ibid.) come together in this women’s history heritage walk through Glasgow’s Merchant City.
Three generations of women in my family stand looking over the foliage of the Rottenrow gardens where the old hospital used to loom over the city. I point out to my daughter that the portico we are in was the entrance to the hospital. Huge green leaves fill the windows and she asks: ‘are they real?’ I assure her they are. While I am on a walk with my family, I am also undertaking what David Overend describes as ‘creative fieldwork’ (2023: 6), acknowledging the ways in which our presence and engagement with a site becomes part of it. Once everyone has gathered, we walk a short distance to find some shade and learn about the now demolished hospital, commemorated by a 7m high sculpture of a safety pin with a bird on top called Mhtpothta/Maternity created by George Wylie and installed on the site in 2004 by the University of Strathclyde. Our guides tell us that we are on the edge of the Merchant City, but that this area would have been populated by the poorer classes, who lived in the shadow of the smoking factories while the wealthy merchants lived further down the hill. Everyone laughs when the guide tells of the famous tobacco lord John Glassford (the namesake of Glassford Street) who had a portrait of his wife repainted with the face of his new spouse: ‘This piece of 18th century editing deems women to be replaceable, almost ghostly; there in spirit but not important to the story’ (GWL heritage walk).
Figure 2: Foliage through the windows of the portico on the site of the old maternity hospital
Figure 3: Rottenrow Gardens
The artist Joan Eardley painted the children in this area and was notorious for walking around with her paints and canvases in a pram. Her Three Children at a Tenement Window provides the cover of the map for the walk. Our tour guide tells a story about how Eardley painted her male friend nude, and after a Glasgow newspaper printed her address in the paper she was inundated with offers from men to take their clothes off for her. She was known to say that Glasgow has ‘a living thing. While Glasgow has this I’ll always want to paint.’ Joan died of breast cancer in 1963 aged 42 but her depictions of Glasgow children live on in galleries across Scotland and the world.
Our guide says, ‘If you hiked up the hill, imagine doing it whilst nearly 9 months pregnant; the incline was known by some as Induction Brae or Hill’ (GWL heritage walk). As well as a maternity hospital, it was also a midwifery training centre and pioneered ultrasound (used at Glasgow shipyards) and risky caesarean-sections. We learn from the tour guides that women who suffered from poor diet and no sunlight (referred to in the medical literature of the time as having ‘rickety dwarfism’) had deformed pelvises and became pioneers of the surgery. The first woman, a 27-year-old who had the operation in April 1888, called her son Caesar Cameron, after the procedure and Dr Cameron who delivered her baby.
Figure 4: Image of women who underwent caesarean sections at the hospital
Figure 5: Nurses at Rottenrow
My own daughter was born by emergency-c-section, and I think about the lineage of women who had this surgery in the 1880s, who would stay in bed for 18 days after the surgery (we were out the hospital less than 24hours later). Now aged four my daughter sits in her pram and draws while the women talk. I am not sure how much she is taking in but when I ask her what she is drawing she says it is the ‘green ladies’, the names given to the nurses due to their green uniforms and strong sense of sisterhood. The Lock Hospital for Unfortunate Females was also on this site, a treatment centre for women and children with venereal diseases which opened in 1805 and was based in Rottenrow in 1845-6, designed to look like the surrounding tenements, presumably to hide what were seen as morally objectionable diseases.
As we walk deeper into the Merchant City on to George Street, the tour guides battle against the traffic noise to be heard. We stand on the site of the home of the former Strickland Press, where The Word (a Socialist paper which ran from 1938-1962) was published. Ethel Macdonald and Jenny Patrick were two of the key figures in the paper ensuring issues such as family planning and equality for women were covered. They travelled to Spain during the civil war and Ethel earned the name ‘the Scots Scarlet Pimpernel’ due to her role at an anarchist radio station in Barcelona and supporting comrades in prison.
Figure 6: Ethel MacDonald
Figure 7: News article about The Scots Scarlet Pimpernel, Ethel MacDonald (taken outside the Press Bar).
The smart green tiles of The Press Bar are a legacy of the news heritage of these streets and on this sunny day, people enjoy a cold pint of lager on the outdoor tables, Glasgow passing for European in the sunshine. We stand outside the Herald building on Albion Street (1980-1995) as our guides focus on women in news, charting the histories of those writers and the occasional rare editor who ‘made it beyond the women’s pages’. They evoke the sounds and atmosphere of the street when at midnight the presses would be fired up and the sound of machinery would be followed by the noise of bundles of newspapers smacking on to the pavement. A picture is passed around of Dorothy Grace Elder, a features editor within the worker’s co-operative which created The Scottish Daily News.
As we enter the gates of the St David’s Ramshorn Church the street noise fades away and the stillness of the green leafy graveyard settles over the group. We are here to hear the story of the story of Pierre Emile L’Angelier who died in 1857 and rests in the Fleming family tomb. When his body was exhumed two days after his death, he was found to have enough arsenic to kill 20 men in his system. Miss Madeline Smith’s love letters were found at his home and her murder trial became one of the most famous Victorian cases. ‘Why is there only one boy?’ my daughter asks, nodding to the man who has accompanied his wife for the day (and who ends up playing the judge in the short re-enactment of Madeline Smith’s trial – the verdict of not proven saw her walking free). I explain to my daughter that we are on a women’s history walk so it is mainly women here, but that everyone is welcome. She nods, seemingly satisfied, and returns to doodling on the map with her favourite pink pen.
Figure 8: Images of Blythswood Square and rendering of Madeline Smith in Ramshorn churchyard
Figure 9: Exterior of the Ramshorn Church, Ingram Street
Returning to the bustling streets with people sitting outside enjoying beers and a late lunch, we hear about women’s involvement in the temperance movement, as 19th century Glasgow became a haven for tearooms to try to move away from the problems caused by the ‘demon drink’ (GWL heritage walk). Carrie A. Nation, known as the bar-room smasher came from Kentucky armed with a hatchet to smash bars in the city. Her newspaper The Hatchet was part of the highly active Glasgow temperance movement which aimed in politicising women and making visible the effects on families, such as domestic abuse, as one of the women detectives tells us ‘A nation never rises higher than its mothers’ (GWL heritage walk).
As the tour is running late, the route is diverted to a final stop, on Brunswick Street where we learn of Miss Catherine Cranston, one of the most important businesswomen of the Victorian era, famous for her tearooms. At a time when women stayed home, her father George Cranston was a supporter of women’s suffrage and wanted to educate his daughters. She cannily listed herself as C. Cranston in the phone book as women came after their husbands, and she also decided to keep her maiden name after she got married, something that was unheard of at the time. She walked up Sauchiehall street, named as the street ‘where the willows grow’ to make herself visible on the streets, a businesswoman amongst the flaneurs at a time when women’s place was in the home.
Figure 10: Detail of entrance, Brunswick Street, final stop on the tour
Figure 11: My daughter holding a cartoon image of Dorothy Grace Elder: Women Make History
I was inspired to come on this walk after reading Where are the Women?By Sara Sheridan which my mother-in-law gifted to me for Christmas last year and it felt fitting to come with her as she has a keen interest in history. My daughter also attended, and I was glad, as I want her to know of the women that shaped this city, invisible compared to the men who are monumentalised and celebrated through the statues, street names and buildings. There are some who should not be celebrated, Glasgow’s role in the history of slavery more evidently traced in the Merchant City than any other part of the city. Geographer Gillian Rose argues that one way in which identity is connected to a particular place is by a feeling that you belong to this place. Can you feel like you belong if you don’t see yourself represented or monumentalised or even acknowledged? Kern also writes about the ‘geography of fear’ (2021: 149) that many women experience (often more acutely for women of colour, transwomen and queer women) as they walk through the city streets, especially at night, the threat of sexual violence never far away. As Kathleen Jamie writes: ‘It doesn’t seem too much to ask, to be able to walk outdoors, even in daylight without fear’ (2021: 9).
Sheridan’s book opens with Solnit’s reflection that she couldn’t imagine how she might have conceived of herself and her possibilities if she had moved through a city where most things were named after women. Glasgow, like many other cities, was built and historicised by men, as the dominant gender. So where are the women? They live on in the stories that are told on the streets of the city, not often visibly monumentalised, but traced through the oral histories of those pioneers and rebels, mothers, wives, and daughters who made their mark on Glasgow. This is walking the feminist city.
Bibliography
Andrews, Kerri. 2021. Wanderers: A History of Women Walking. London: Reaktion Books.
